I was going to post this as a comment, but it was in an anarchism community, and I figured some sections of it might be unacceptable there. Hence, new post.

Here’s a guideline of how to interact with cops. There are more or less three modes, depending on your read of the situation. Cops are not always the enemy or the maniacal whole-job-is-making-evil thugs that Lemmy sometimes makes them out to be. It really is bad for people to get mugged or their cars broken into, and they’re the solution our society has come up with to minimize the amount of it that happens. It’s not always a bad thing.

If you find yourself talking to the cops, there are more or less three ways:

  • They’re there to solve a real problem. Someone’s car got broken into, someone got beat up. Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation. In almost all of the US, their effect on the problem will be positive, and it’ll be a lot more positive if they have a good grasp of what happened. If, in your opinion, the person they’re trying to catch really did do something that warrants a law enforcement response, then give them a hand. Use your judgement as to whether that’s warranted of course, and your impression of the justice level in your local area, since it varies quite a lot in the US.
  • They’re there for you. Shut the fuck up. Don’t say a goddamned word. It doesn’t even matter if you didn’t do it. Don’t explain. Shut the fuck up. Be polite, obey lawful orders, definitely don’t fight them or you’ll get a felony and might also get injured or worse, but tell them that if you’re suspected of a crime, then you’d like to talk to a lawyer, and you have nothing else to say. And then, shut the fuck up and cooperate. Maybe you want to go as far as “Were you shoplifting?” “What? No. That wasn’t me, man.” But any further explanation than that, just leave it alone. Definitely don’t make something up on the spot, to make yourself sound innocent, if you did do it. For the love of God, don’t do that.
  • They’re there for someone who didn’t do anything wrong. The reason for this post is, anything and everything with ICE and immigration falls into this category. Some things with local cops will, also. Just be unhelpful and simple. No, I didn’t see anything. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Be vague. Don’t get creative, keep it simple, don’t refuse to give your ID or otherwise antagonize them or commit minor crimes of obstruction, but just do your best imitation of someone who just fell from the sky. “So you’ve NEVER MET your neighbor. Your neighbor across the hall.” “Nope.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I don’t know.” “I mean, she gave us your name, she said she’d talked to you.” “I don’t know, I don’t remember that.” Don’t embellish. Don’t explain why. Just calmly let the silence linger and the pressure build up, without adding extra words.

Like I said, everything with ICE or other immigration authorities falls into the third category. No exceptions. Everything. The same applies with any type of federal law enforcement, I suspect, for the next few years.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
    1·
    4 hours ago

    It is absolutely not our system. In my case, the municipal government is the local branch of the state government, which is itself subordinate to the federal government. And at all levels, the people with the money are the ones that pull the strings. If push comes to shove and it’s the will of the people vs the will of the higher levels of government, the will of the government usually wins, and the will of the most powerful local capitalist will win every time (because states amplify the political power of those who are wealthy enough to prop them up).

    This simply is not how it works. If you run for city council, and you have the city council on the mayor on board, and you disband the city police, nobody in the state government is going to give a shit. They may be unhappy when a ton of calls for service come in for the state police, there actually was an issue like that in Texas where something weird was going on with the city and they were just letting almost all their calls get handled by some other jurisdiction.

    But regardless: If enough people run for office, and win, it doesn’t matter how much money some local business has. With very rare corrupt exceptions (I can literally think of two, post-reconstruction), they’re now in charge. Money is tied in with who will win, that’s completely true. I didn’t mean “indirectly” in the sense of, it’s a small or trivial factor. It’s a huge factor. But, if you can overcome it, you can be in charge. Full stop.

    What are you alleging will be the mechanism by which the state government “doesn’t let” the city not have police? There are a lot of places in the US that don’t have any police below the county level. You’re sort of on your own, out in the country, although someone from the sheriff’s department may come out after a while if you call. It’s just that every single city, and most towns, have opted to have a separate local police force. But there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from incorporating in a new place and not having police.

    Here’s actually an example of it happening: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling

    The libertarians took over the town, and among other changes, functionally disabled the police. No one came to stop them. They have the votes, so they’re in charge now.

    (Edit: Actually, another good example along the same lines is from “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix. Those guys built their own community, with no police, and nobody cared for quite a while. And then, even when they started creating issues enough with the town that the ordinary people reached the point of “something must be done,” it took quite a bit of doing for the forces of law and order to do anything about it. The issue was, at all times, that they were committing crimes which impacted the town. Simply being out in their little place with no police was completely fine, before, during, and after.)

    (Edit: And, there’s a whole separate case study when the Freak Party was going to take over Aspen. That one’s significantly more complex, among other reasons because it does include some sense in which the establishment “didn’t let” them do it, but still interesting to talk about as an example of how things play out in the real world, instead of in someone’s particular ideology.)

    You keep lecturing me at quite a lot of length about how it actually works, but what you’re saying is not how it works. I’m happy to show you evidence and reasons, and sources. Are you open to that?

    I would argue that this basically is the reality of the situation, and that the voting is just to make the smallest of changes. (“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” I would like to offer a corollary: if a possibility is so impactful that it would actually disrupt the capitalist order, it will never be put up for a vote, because the government gets to decide what gets voted on, and the politicians are indirectly controlled by the capitalists.) Like with police interrogations, voting is not an equal interaction between the government and its subjects. The government has all the power, and that power is controlled by the capitalist class.

    That’s not how it works. Reference the article above, as a counterexample. I will not at all tell you that capitalism is not deeply and corruptly entrenched within our system, both indirectly in how much money it costs to even muster the votes to win the election, and at how the system gets set up at a bigger-government level for bigger jurisdictions. But, removing the police force at the municipality level actually is something that’s perfectly realistic to do, has been done before, and you can look at the experiment and see how it played out. You can also, if you think an anarchist community would make it work better, just make it happen and make your community, just like the libertarians did.